Kill fee · Design
Kill fee in design: what is normal
Design projects typically tier the kill fee: about 25% at kickoff, 50% mid-project, 75-100% after delivery.
Typical range
25% at kickoff or on cancellation before real work begins; around 50% after concepts or drafts exist; 75-100% once final files are delivered.
Off-market
No kill fee clause at all, or a clause that only pays for hours the freelancer can itemize after the fact. Both leave the risk almost entirely with the designer.
One-line fix
One sentence in the contract: "If Client cancels: 25% of the fee is due before kickoff, 50% after first concepts, 100% after final delivery."
What we see
Design projects lend themselves to a tiered kill fee because there are clear milestones: kickoff, concept, revisions, final files. Each of those is a moment when meaningful work has been done and the deliverable, even if never used, has real value to the client.
The most common gap in client-drafted design contracts is silence: no kill fee clause exists, which by default means the freelancer absorbs the entire loss of a cancellation. Silence is not neutral. Silence favors whoever benefits from the ambiguity, which in this case is the client walking away.
The counter that lands without drama is to frame the kill fee as protection for both sides: it removes the pressure to keep pushing a project the client no longer wants, and it removes the risk from the freelancer's calendar. Studios and agencies almost never object to a kill fee once it is written in a way that mirrors their own paper.
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